The first US pilot shot down in the Gulf War is still alive and being held captive in Iraq, it was reported today.

British intelligence has told the CIA that Navy Lieutenant Commander Michael Speicher is still alive, the Washington Times claimed.

Speicher was declared killed in action after his F-18 Hornet was shot down over Iraq on January 17 1991.

According to US intelligence officials, the British report said only two Iraqis are permitted to see the 44-year-old American: the chief of Iraq's intelligence service, and Uday Hussein, son of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Last year Speicher was re-classified as "missing in action" by the Pentagon, after information from an Iraqi defector.

The defector said he had taken an injured US pilot to Baghdad six weeks after the Gulf war began. From a photograph, he identified Speicher was the pilot.

Father-of-two Speicher was the first American pilot shot down in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, and the only one whose fate remains unknown.

At the time, some senior officers thought Commander Speicher might have survived the crash. They said they had a moral obligation to bring him back, dead or alive, no matter how long it took.

So special-operations soldiers planned a secret mission to scour the crash site for clues. Their chances of success were high, they said, and the risks of an Iraqi response very low.

But Pentagon chiefs balked, fearing that the risks outweighed the rewards.

General John Shalikashvili, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, scrubbed the plan, saying, "I do not want to have to write the parents and tell them that their son or daughter died looking for old bones."

President George Bush has called Iraq one of three "axis of evil" states, and senior Pentagon policy makers have said it should be the next target for US anti-terrorism operation.